Removable media, such as hard disk drives, tape cartridges, optical drives, etc., are used to store data, particularly when a large amount of data is to be stored and low costs are desired. However, it can be overly time consuming to identify what is present on a particular removable medium by mounting the medium and reading it. This is especially true when thousands of removable media are used to store data. Therefore, there is a need in the art of removable media mass storage to provide metadata about what data is stored on each removable medium. Such a solution would be especially useful in many different applications, especially those involving video files, e.g. Digital Video Surveillance (DVS), broadcast studios (e.g. Fox, CBS, ABC, etc.), film studies which create digital film (e.g. whether shot directly into a digital format, or by conversion of previously shot analog clips to digital, etc.), and for editing any digital formats, especially by small independent contractors. However, attempts at such a solution have failed to provide an efficient and useful system.
For example, in one existing solution, a Quantum MXF-aware drive apparently extracts a list of all the files being written to a tape cartridge in MXF format and stores this list to the cartridge in some special way, and there are multiple versions of this storage. In the linear-tape open (LTO) version, the list is most likely stored in a HouseKeeping DataSet (HKDS). In this way, a file list has been created to manage the data that is stored to a tape cartridge. In this list, for each file, not only the file name is available, but also other metadata associated with that file (e.g. if it was a digital film clip, perhaps the other metadata includes the timecode, the digital film format, location shot, camera number, clip length, etc.). The file list is accessed when a tape cartridge is mounted. There is an agent on the host which puts all the files into a window. Then, the user on the host can simply select which files are desired on the tape cartridge, and then drag them to another window to indicate that these files are to be pulled off tape and put on a disk somewhere—typically so that the files may be edited.
However, there is still a need for easily and quickly accessing metadata which corresponds to data on the individual removable media, such as tape cartridges, to quickly identify what data is stored to the individual removable media without needing to access the individual removable media itself.